


leave your thumbprints on the trigger of his heart

by ZoeBug



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: (sort of), Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Change.org petition Let Inej Dom Kaz 2k17-Forever, Clothed Sex, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Glove Kink, Gloves, Knifeplay, Light Power Play, Mention of Violent Revenge Fantasy, Mutual Masturbation, Porn with Feelings, Post-Crooked Kingdom, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Under-negotiated Kink, not just cause they're gloves but cause they're Kaz's gloves ya feel?, very light blood play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-05 10:56:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11012025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug
Summary: But hadn’t that always been the way with his Wraith? Things were always capable of more than they should be when it was Inej who wielded them.In her hands, a few inches of steel could bring a sudden and painful death. On her feet, a pair of rubber-soled slippers could scale six stories of sheer metal.Beneath her knives, a twisted and terrible creature such as Kaz Brekker could be made to think of things like healing.





	leave your thumbprints on the trigger of his heart

**Author's Note:**

> I finished Crooked Kingdom & was a giant ball of emotions so I just had to. The sheer TENSION between these two was addictive and I couldn't help but think about how easily they'd end up gravitating toward kink activities as a way of being intimate without touching if things had progressed between them. And just try to tell me Kaz _isn't_ hot for Inej's knives, ok?
> 
> I also didn't mean for this to be so damn long and yet here I am with like 11k of kinky emotional kanej so you can clearly see how my life is doing atm. :') 
> 
> Title was taken from "How to Make a Ghost of a Poet" by Sean Glatch. 
> 
> Takes place after the events of Crooked Kingdom, during one of Inej's frequent stops back in Ketterdam.

In the Barrel, there wasn’t any such thing as real quiet.

Always, always, some raucous shouting would burst from the cobblestones outside of windows or the damp wood held together by rusted nails conspired to perpetual creaking or even the splashes of boats rowing by in the canals bled through in stiller moments. And the Slat carried its own distinct set of sounds to add to Ketterdam’s ceaseless noise. Even all the way up the three flights of stairs to Kaz’s room, the air was far from empty.

So why was it that Kaz felt like his ears were ringing with the kind of quiet that only settled over the Slat when Inej was back in town?

It was different during the months she was away―out at sea and chasing down slaving ships like some sort of vengeful storm, always on the horizon. The kind of quiets that found Kaz while Inej was away were the ordinary kind, the Barrel kind of quiet that was never really quite quiet at all―lulls in conversation, voices echoing across water from far down a canal.

But on those blessed weeks when _The Wraith_ could be seen docked at birth twenty-two, when Kaz would make his way up the stairs of the Slat to his small, dark room and find an equally small, dark figure lounging on his windowsill, the quiets seemed... different.

She was always silent, of course. Soundless and invisible; his talented Wraith. So why did the quiets always feel so different with her inside of them?

And why did the hush of Kaz's room tonight seem to consist of an entirely different sort altogether?

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that tonight she was not hiding in the corners’ shadows. She was not pressed against any dimly lit wall or crouched soundlessly around some corner. She was not perched on the sill of his window turned away from the darkness of his room toward the darkness of Ketterdam stretching out below.

No, tonight Inej sat atop his make-shift desk, fully lit and with her back straight. She had crossed her legs and her knees bent over the edge of the old door he used as a tabletop, her calves swaying gently as she worked. 

Unsheathed and laid side by side on the desk beside her, Inej's collection of knives were splayed grandly. Like the platters of treats offered by servants at rich mercher parties, they seemed arranged for her to peruse and select to her liking. They glittered, wicked and beautiful in the low lamplight.

Although Inej sat facing him, her head and shoulders tilted away as she cleaned one of the knives with a length of cloth. This was a smaller blade, Sankt Vladimir, the one she kept hidden away in her boot. During the other times that Kaz had watched Inej clean her knives, she had used a bottle of oil specially made for such weapons.

But here, tonight, she simply was re-dampening a cloth in a cup of water and methodically wiping down each piece in her collection. Kaz knew the reason―what it was in preparation for.

The room wasn’t quiet by any means, but the soft squeak of leather gloves as his fingers curled into loose fists atop his knees seemed somehow louder than normal. The chair normally at his desk had been pushed a few feet back and it was where Kaz was now seated, having divested himself of his coat, hat, and vest. His crow’s head cane leaned against the wall by the closed and locked door.

It―this _thing_ between them―wasn’t something they’d exactly _discussed_ , in as many words.

He wasn’t precisely sure when the realization of this type of compatibility between them had solidified.

Perhaps it had been born of the subtle shifts of body weight after suggestive gibes, or in the too-quick flicker of eyes toward and then away from after teasing taunts. Maybe the implication of precious handfuls of days spent in each other’s company followed by impending months devoid of it had sped its development to this point.

Or maybe it had been there from the moment Kaz had given Inej that first knife, had been born as he stood there watching her fingers close around the sheath, watching her draw the blade out, watching her eyes darken at the sharp gleam of it.

_“Maybe I’ll use it on you,”_ she’d said.

There were often moments between the two of them in which Inej opted not to speak. She would simply stand and look at him, gaze flicking about his features.

Kaz wondered sometimes what it was that she saw when she studied him like that. Kaz wondered sometimes if it was not unlike what he found gazing back at him.

Atop his desk, Inej’s movements were unhurried and unconcerned, comfortable and slow. Kaz wouldn’t say it was _rare_ , exactly, to see Inej fully lit in the center of a room. But there was a different tilt to her jaw like this―her chin was lifted higher, her brow smooth and untroubled, her shoulders squared.

_Like she’s about to perform_ , Kaz thought. _Like she’s about to strike_.

Certainty. Confidence. Just the barest hint of well-earned arrogance. It was a look that suited Inej startlingly well. She was a Queen gazing down, surveying all that which fell under her rule.

When Inej finished with the knife currently in her hands she lifted it up, letting it catch the lamplight, studying it. Her eyes didn’t leave the metal's gleam when she finally spoke.

“Has anyone ever called you ‘pretty,’ Kaz?”

Kaz’s throat felt suddenly and desperately parched.

“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure, no.” Part of him was relieved to hear the words come out low and even.

Inej just hummed and placed the knife down on the wood beside her, newly empty hand hovering over the array of knives.

The selection she eventually lifted from the desk was a beautiful and subtly curved thing with a pale handle made of bone. Sankta Alina’s blade glittered like midday sun on the surface of the canals and Kaz realized it was one she had already cleaned―one primed and ready for use.

He heard his pulse, suddenly loud and rushing in his ears.

The slight curve to her lips would have been unnoticeable to someone who had not watched Inej as long or as raptly as Kaz had. It was a wicked kind of smirk, the kind that promised all the more for its subtle nature.

“I have,” Inej said, easy as anything. “Many times.”

Pretty was too weak and fragile a word for his Wraith, Kaz couldn’t help but think. Pretty was for things like plucked flowers dying in vases. Inej was a vine of ivy growing in a snaking spiral up around the trunks of trees. The kind that silently choked the life from that which it climbed before the victim knew it was ever in danger.

“It’s not something I enjoy being called.” Inej’s words were thin and sharp and terrible.

“What _do_ you enjoy being called, then?” Kaz asked.

Inej brought a finger up to the blade in her hands. Very lightly she began to slide the pad of her index finger along its sharpened edge. Kaz’s tracked the movement intently. Inej wasn’t looking at him but he could almost _feel_ the satisfaction his focus on it brought her.

“Wraith,” she replied, the word low and luxurious as if she were savoring its taste. If she grinned, Kaz wondered if he’d be able to see bits of it caught between her teeth. “Shadow. Demon. The reason to speak in soft voices.” And like a thundercloud overtaking the sky, she turned her dark eyes for the first time that night to meet his. “The nightmare in men’s hearts.”

Kaz’s breath stuck in his chest.

On normal nights, this is not the answer Inej would have given. On normal nights, she would have simply said: “Inej,” would have told him she preferred her name to any other moniker.

But tonight, a shifting was taking place in the small attic room of the Slat―one where Inej wore the darkness of her persona like battle gear, with pride and excitement, and where Kaz sat still and patient and waited for Inej to lead. To strike, maybe. They meant the same thing on nights like this.

Inej’s eyes flicked down, lingering on his gloved hands where his loose fists clenched spasmodically at her words. This small movement of Kaz’s wasn’t something that would have been apparent to most, but this was his Wraith. She never missed a thing.

Inej uncrossed and spread her legs to let them hang open from the desk’s edge, leaning down to rest her elbows on her knees. It was a young, masculine posture. Like that of Barrel boys on smoke breaks. Kaz liked the look of it on her―easy and entitled.

“They call me _your_ spider, you know that? I hear them talking. ‘Dirtyhands’ pet shadow,’ they call me. ‘Brekker’s little Wraith.’” She huffed something very near to a laugh and the smirk at her lips stretched the barest inch wider. She was trailing her fingers almost lazily along the edge of the knife once more. “But we both know the truth of that, don’t we?”

He felt pinned to the chair by her gaze and her words and her _presence_. It was remarkable to Kaz how someone who slipped so easily into invisibility could seem to fill a room like this; Inej was a flame spreading outwards from its source, licking into every corner and crevice and devouring it all.

“I like it when they call you that,” Kaz admitted, if only to see the flames of her flicker at the words.

One of her dark eyebrow rose the slightest bit.

It was a hideously truthful thing, that statement. _Brekker’s little Wraith._ The words had something darker and sharper than pride seeping through his chest.

But on nights like these, with Inej in his room at the top of the Slat, the truth of the world bent deliciously sideways into a configuration in which his confession was something inflammatory―matches in a child’s fingers. Daring. Curious. Incendiary.

After a long moment Inej let out a breath through lips slanted in amusement, dipping her chin and licking her lips. On either side of her casually splayed thighs, she dropped her hands to the desk’s edge. Sankta Alina clunked hollowly against the wood as she did so. 

“Unbutton your shirt.” Easy. Casual. Authoritative.  

Kaz swallowed thickly and raised his hands to the first button at the collar.

Inej hopped silently from her perch on the edge of the desk, eliciting barely creak from the old wood; a near-miraculous feat. Inside his gloves, Kaz felt the beginning of sweat pricking across his fingertips.

Kaz had been shirtless in front of Inej before, of course. But he had been riding high off a victory then, buoyed up by the confidence it induced. It had been on his terms and at his discretion.

Here, it was up to Inej how much armor he would be allowed to keep. And even this small removal at her command―just _unbuttoning_ his shirt, he hadn’t even taken it off yet, _Saints_ ―left him feeling shaky and exposed.

He closed his eyes for a moment as he fumbled with the second to last button.

Inej was watching him quietly, taking occasional leisurely steps around toward one side of his chair.

Kaz finished undoing the last button and exhaled, letting his shirt hang open as his hands return to his knees. The air in the attic room wasn’t cold but he wasn’t accustomed to the feeling of air on his bare skin, to feeling its light and shifting touch without a buffer. He suppressed a shiver at the feeling.

Inej made a soft satisfied sound from somewhere to his right, but Kaz kept his neck straight and his eyes trained forward on the remaining knives on the desk.

“Off.”

Kaz jerked his chin in a twitch of a nod and leaned forward to slide his shirt from his shoulders. He felt as though he’d just climbed the three flights of stairs up to his room all over again.

The moment he had the sleeves slipped over and clear of his gloved hands, Kaz felt the shirt plucked from his grip. To be put aside, he supposed. He let it go easily, wondering when it was exactly she’d moved around behind him.

“Good,” Inej murmured and she sounded closer than he’d expected. He felt more than heard the small amused breath she gave and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up at the sensation. “That’s good, Kaz.”

“Inej…” he started.

Years of honing every aspect of an intimidating nature had collaborated with puberty in order to divest Kaz of the boyish nasal tone of his youth. Together, nature and hard work had carved Kaz a voice as low and grating as broken glass crushed underfoot: a cold growl fit to accompany the reputation of Dirtyhands.

But around Inej’s name Kaz’s voice rasped differently, and at the sound of it he felt her let out another breath. The warmth of it hit the back of his neck again. A shudder threatened to zip down his spine and suppressing it was a very near thing.

That was all part of this, Kaz reminded himself. That he was allowed to fight it in the beginning, the signs of how much this―how much _her_ like this―affected him. That sort of honesty was not an easy task for someone like him. And Inej knew this.

The thought steadied him somewhat, kept the vulnerability of it all from tipping him into a frenzied panic. This was Inej, after all. Out of anyone, she was the one he could allow to take him apart like this.

“Shh,” she shushed and she must have been pressed right up against the chair back because Kaz could _feel_ her closeness, leaning to the left of him. Right beside his ear. “Be still.”

Kaz took in a heavy breath through his nose and closed his eyes. He sat ramrod straight in the chair, his gloved hands clutching at his knees.

Keeping completely still while waiting for that first contact of blade to skin was perhaps one of the most difficult things Kaz had ever done. It never got easier, even though this was not the first time they had done this. Every inch of his neck felt like it was alight, prickling with anticipation.

He felt it first at the corner of his jaw just below his ear. It was cold, and pressed so lightly that he couldn’t even feel the wicked angle of the tip bending his skin―just _barely_ touching him.

Kaz jerked in a sharp breath through his nose at the contact, his jaw clenching in automatic response.

“Easy,” Inej murmured, drawing the word out soft and silky beside him. But she didn’t lay a hand on him, didn’t attempt to hold him in place, didn’t draw the knife away. She simply held it there, barely pressed against the skin of his jaw. Kaz let out the barest puff of a breath and, with an effort, relaxed the muscles of his jaw. “That’s it.”

It was all part of this. Kaz had to keep reminding himself. On some nights when the violent tangle at the core of him was coiled too tightly, Inej―who knew of his fear and his fight and his ruthlessness―could (and somehow miraculously _wanted_ to) carve it away with steady hands and quiet breaths until the hideous weakness of him breached the surface. 

Inej changed the angle of her hand to let the long edge of the blade press along the line of his jaw. It hovered still for a moment before she began to drag the steel across his skin. Kaz heard the rasp as the metal caught on the beginnings of stubble.

The movement stilled before it reached his chin, Inej tilting the blade’s angle of pressure just enough that the tip moved inward until it was pressed up into the soft skin just under his jaw.

Something flickering and electric shot through Kaz’s chest―a bird beating its wings against the cage of his ribs.

He tried to push back every hard-won instinct the Barrel had forged in him, every single piece of Kaz that urged him to jerk away, to whirl around, to grab Inej’s hand and disarm her. He pushed against everything in him that ached to fight, to hurt, to distrust, to drive away. He fought to let himself to lean into this, to allow himself the wicked and taut pleasure of Inej’s knives on him.

After a moment, Kaz managed to let his head tilt at the pressure of her knife. It was more a suggestion of surrender than any proper baring of his neck but he heard Inej let out a barely-there sigh of appreciation nonetheless.

“There we go.” Something darkly pleased escaped in her voice and Kaz wondered if it was something that had always lived inside of her. Or perhaps, like with Kaz, it was something that Ketterdam seeded in all its residents, some kind of growth that flourished in dark and damp corners of the Barrel.

Kaz swallowed. It sounded loud to his own ears and he felt the movement keenly against the blade still pressed to the underside of his jaw.

“Come on, Kaz,” Inej urged. “Let me give you what you need.”

Kaz almost felt like laughing. A wild kind of clarity briefly shifted into place, momentarily lifting him out of the downwards drift he had been fighting so hard to allow himself. What a ridiculous situation he found himself in. What ridiculous and dangerous things this weakness of his drove him to do.

_Need_. That was a word for it, all right.

Opening his eyes, he exhaled through his nose and licked his lips.

“Okay,” he said and it came out more breath than word.

The next moment, the blade was gone from his jaw and Inej was rounding the chair to stand in front of him. Her eyes were always dark but now the pupils were blown wide, making her eyes look even more shadowed than usual in the dimness of the single lamp on his desk.

Lit from behind, framed by it like this, Kaz thought distantly that she looked almost like a painting of one of her Saints. Though he doubted any true believer would depict a saint looking as glorious and terrible as Inej did then, with a knife in her hand and wickedness in her eyes.

She wore only a plain undershirt that left her arms and shoulders bare, neckline scooping generously below her collarbones, and a pair of loose trousers. Yet the clothing did nothing to detract from the easy control that she commanded.

Kaz was a man who knew the power of clothing to summon an air of authority. He knew the value of a proper costume, a proper disguise. Yet Inej seemed not to require such things. His Wraith was a frightening force indeed if she could stand before him essentially in sleep attire and still manage send his heart thudding rapidly from something that hung between desire and fear.

Finally, Inej took a step forward. Then another. Then another. Soon enough Kaz was parting his knees to allow her room to stand between them, so close to his bare torso he could feel the heat of her.

Inej slid the flat of the knife under his chin, using it to tilt his head up to meet her gaze. The right corner of her mouth was once more curved up at the corner and it sent something intensely hot and _wanting_ through Kaz.

“Ask me for it.”

And there it was. The part of all of this that was the hardest every time: that she didn’t let him sink into her will and deflect his participation in all of this. She made him show it in his words and his actions; she made him complicit in each piece of armor she removed.

The words stuck in his throat. Just as they nearly always did.

Prying the mask of “Dirtyhands” from his skin was a monumental feat when he spent the majority of his time melding ruthlessness to every curve and angle of his being. He’d fought so hard to drown him―that boy who had glanced toward Inej on Vellgeluk, whose yearnings brought nothing but death and defeat upon them all―and now, in these moments with her, Kaz had to fight the pull of the water every inch of the way as he attempted to dredge that version of himself back to the surface.

And Inej watched all of it, watched every shift and flicker of it roll across his face, quiet and still and breathing evenly all the while. As solid and unyielding as her blades. Something to anchor himself to in the rising tide of fear.

_“This isn’t easy for me, either_.”

This was Inej. This was _Inej_ and he could do this.

“Please, Inej,” he managed. He thought he might be trembling.

Inej hummed, considering, but eventually seemed to decide his response was passible. In response she turned the blade, pressing it across the underside of his jaw from ear to ear in the way a proper criminal would threaten a mark. It was a reward. A relief.

The cold sharpness of it grounded him, narrowed his mind to only this moment. He could feel the knuckle of one of her fingers, curled around the handle, barely brushing his jawbone. Kaz swallowed again just to feel the blade more sharply against his throat. 

“Give me your gloves.”

Giving the barest fraction of a nod, hyper-aware of the blade’s press against his every tiny shift, Kaz raised his hands from his knees.

He held her gaze every second of the time it took him to do as she had asked, never once looking away as he undid the buttons at his wrists. Distantly, he was aware how loud his breathing sounded in the small space between them. Inej stared back, unrelenting and all-consuming.

One by one, he pulled the gloves’ fingers loose from his right hand, then his left, until finally he slid them from his hands entirely. Setting them neatly atop each other, Kaz held his gloves out to her. Inej’s eyes did not leave his as she lifted her free hand from where it had been gripping the chair back.

Slowly, she reached down to Kaz’s offering hand. She did not brush his skin as she took them from him but she might as well have. Something inside of him shook violently―an earthquake of an intensely personal variety.

Shirtless and gloveless, pinned and bare beneath Inej’s gaze and knives and terrifying understanding, Kaz felt frayed. Breathless. Edging on _undone_.

“You just-” she breathed. Her eyes roved across his face almost hungrily, dipping down across the pale angles of his hands, divested of one more piece of his armor at her request. “ _Saints_ , Kaz.”

The pressure of the knife disappeared all at once from his throat and Kaz’s breath fled his chest in a large burst. Yet there was a part of him, growing in size with every second, that ached at the loss of its press.

Inej licked her lips, eyes dark, and nodded to herself.

“Alright. Hold this,” she said, holding the knife out so close to his face that it blurred before him. Kaz blinked and his hand twitched to reach up, but Inej was immediately shaking her head. The corner of her lip was curling again. “No. No, your hands stay there.”

Half a heartbeat later, understanding struck Kaz and he found he couldn’t suppress the shiver that shot through him, the low coals of heat flaring in his gut.

He licked his lips to wet them before allowing them to part for her. Inej pressed the thin line of the blade into the space between Kaz’s teeth. He bit down against the metal, holding it in place. Inej let go.

Kaz’s breath stuttered out through his nose. He could feel that Inej had pressed the dull edge against the corners of his lips, but the sensation of thin hard metal against his teeth and coolness against his lips had Kaz’s body tensing in a not entirely unpleasant way. The momentary sparks of heat had begun rapidly pooling in his gut, want and desire rising like a flush to the surface of him.

With her hands now free, Inej proceeded to slip his gloves onto one hand and then the other, wiggling her fingers to get them fit as well as they would. Next, she fastened the buttons at each wrist to keep them snugly in place.

After she’d finished, Inej studied her newly leather-clad hands, fingers curling and uncurling from experimental fists a few times.

They looked good on her, Kaz thought distantly. Heatedly.

He ran his tongue along the back of the knife and felt his heart hammering insistently against his ribcage. Inej looked back at Kaz, seemingly satisfied, and that same darkly amused light flitted across her face once more.

“Your face is flushed,” Inej stated, her voice soft and low. Kaz could feel it now, as if her words had drawn it into existence. His face and chest felt hot and sensitive, a sensation almost akin to prickling. “It suits you.”

Kaz’s eyelids fluttered briefly when Inej took hold of the blade between his teeth and drew it away. Kaz felt slightly mortified when a thin strand of saliva clung to the metal, stretching from his lips. His lungs seemed entirely too small and he realized that he was breathing fast and shallow and hot into the space between them.

Inej turned away from him then, crossing back to the desk and the rest of her knives.

She surveyed her collection and, almost absentmindedly, pulled the thick plait of her braid over her shoulder to tug at the band fastening the end in place. Everything in Kaz stuttered to a halt. As she considered the glittering metal, Inej’s fingers combed through her hair, pulling the woven strands loose.

Kaz watched her and imagined his own fingers pushing through her hair, imagined the feel of it sliding across his bared skin as she was bent over him. Inej brushed the now loose hair back over her shoulder where it fell to hang in a long, dark curtain.

She plucked a knife from the left end of the row and returned to Kaz where he sat feeling dazed and hot and too large for his skin. The knives in each of her hands looked like they belonged there―as if she’d never _not_ been holding them. They looked natural, like Inej had come into this world with gleaming metal, sharp and deadly, between her fingers.

Inej’s arm jerked upward with lightning quickness, jamming the first knife―Sankta Alina, the one she’d drawn from between Kaz’s lips―straight down into the wood near the edge of the chair seat between Kaz's parted legs with a loud _thunk._

Kaz stared down, unblinking and breathless, at the blade. It was inches from the seam of his trousers where he noticed, with a hot wave of embarrassment, the hard press of his growing arousal was pressing against the fabric in an embarrassingly blatant display of want.

There was _no way_ Inej hadn’t noticed that.

His fingers were white-knuckled claws where they clenched around the curves of his knees in the effort to keep still.

The blade wobbled slightly when Inej released its handle, gloved fingertips absently brushing a line up the length of his exposed stomach and chest. A breath punched its way out of Kaz at the feeling.

He had prepared himself―always prepared himself in unconscious reflex at the proximity of human hands―but there was no sickening twist of his stomach, no stuttering of reality, no dark harbor waves pulling him under. There was only the brush of skin-warmed leather and the promise of sharp and dangerous metal and the dark curtain of Inej’s hair tumbling over her bare shoulders.

_This_ they could do, the two of them.

And it looked so much different from the way desire and adoration drew itself from the depths of most other people’s chests. This was darker and sharper and more violent. But then again hadn’t that always been the way between him and Inej? This thing between them, however gentle at its core, had edges as dark and sharp and violent as anything. But it was how the two of them had found a way closer to each other.

This thing between them, with Kaz’s inching surrenders and Inej above him drawing metal over his skin and the heat and the closeness and the _wanting_ ―it was a way that they could have this.

And Kaz… Kaz _wanted_.

Inej’s attention had turned to the new knife in her other hand, her gaze sliding between it and Kaz’s face. Sankt Peytr, sharp and glittering with promise.

When Inej spoke her voice was low and dark and smooth.

“This was the first knife you gave to me. Do you remember?” Kaz remembered. “Do you want to feel it?”

There were very, _very_ few things in this world Kaz had ever wanted more.

“Yes.”

Inej yanked the knife from the seat of the chair with a swift tug, pausing for a moment to study Kaz’s face before immediately stabbing it into the wooden back of the chair just above Kaz’s shoulder. Kaz clenched his jaw, the fingers at his knees nearly trembling with how tightly he was gripping them. 

Inej shuffled half a step closer―a seemingly impossible feat―to lean one knee on the edge of the chair between Kaz’s legs, pressing against his inner thigh. _Warm_. The word hit him distantly as the feeling of leather pressed against his face, Inej’s gloved hand gripping his jaw and forcing him to look up at her. Her other hand held Sankt Peytr mere inches from his cheek.

“Tell me, Kaz,” Inej said, quiet but forceful. Sturdy.

“I-” His voice sounded desperate and small even to his own ears; a soft gasp of a word. Inej’s fingers tightened on his jaw. Normally, it would have sent him springing to his feet, whirling with a punch, the need to keep distance overtaking him.

But this was Inej. This was _Inej_. He could _feel_ the heat of her thigh against his through the layers of clothes, feel his heartbeat as it thudded desperately in his jaw against the press of her fingers.

_“This isn’t easy for me, either_. _"_

“Tell me what you need.” The words were just above a whisper. A lock of Inej’s hair had slithered over her shoulder to hang long and black, just _barely_ brushing against the skin his chest. Kaz could _feel_ how hard he was now, straining against his trousers, the sensation unfamiliar and insistent and intoxicating.

“ _Hurt me_ , I need-” The words were a gasp. A growl. A coughed curse. He squeezed his eyes shut and he could feel his blood surging through him, pulsing hotly against the pressure of her fingers. In _his_ gloves, _Saints_ \- “Please, Inej.” An exhale. A shameful admission. “I need you to hurt me.”

Inej’s exhale came heated and shuddering against his skin. Kaz felt the slide of leather as her fingers ghosted down over the curve of his neck, palm resting over his throat. Kaz swallowed instinctively.

“Saints,” Inej breathed, pupils dilated, dark and deadly as the girl they belonged to. Kaz had never _wanted_ someone like this before, bodily and viscerally. It terrified him in a way that the simple danger of Inej’s knives and the skill of the hands that held them never could. “ _Saints_ , Kaz, that’s...”

And then, before Kaz could draw breath she was there, moving to straddle his lap in a graceful arc of leg and bend of torso, the lose hang of her hair swinging with the motion. It was mesmerizing and ethereal and Kaz was... Kaz was...

Kaz jerked his hands away from his knees, banished in her wake to curl around the edges of the chair seat. His nails dug crescents into the soft wood of it’s underside.

Inej was a slight but undeniable weight against the tops of his thighs, light yet _solid_ in a way that came with the lithe muscles of an acrobat’s craft. For such a small person, she seemed so imposing; her shoulders bent forward above him, casting the shadow of her claim over him, pinning him between her and the chair like a moth pinned between cork and glass.

She steadied herself with one hand on his shoulder, the warm dry leather reaching Kaz as a familiar and anchoring force.

Inej brought the tip of Sankta Peytr to Kaz’s lips. He parted them on a stuttering inhale. Inej fixed her gaze on his mouth as she spoke, her own stretching into a predatory smirk.

“I always liked that part,” Inej murmured, tracing the curve of Kaz’s lower lip with her dagger. “That little gasp. It’s always the same. No matter how tough or hard the man. He always gasps when he feels the point of my knife press into his skin.”

Kaz didn’t think he could have looked away from her face if the Slat were burning down around him. Inej huffed an amused exhale―the echo of a laugh. 

“Seems you’re not so different from the rest of them, huh, Kaz? Then again...” Inej stretched the words and Kaz swore he could feel the slow slide of it down his chest with the line of her sight, coming to stare openly his parted legs and tented trousers. Something akin to shame but hotter and heavier slunk through Kaz’s stomach at the focus of Inej’s attention. Inej leaned close to his ear, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Dirtyhands does have a reputation for being full of nasty surprises, doesn’t he?”

Some kind of sound escaped Kaz’s lips, his eyelids fluttering momentarily shut at the feel of her hot breath at his ear, the sound of her low voice, the feel of the sharp dagger still at his lips-

Inej leaned back from him, face alight with predatory satisfaction. Kaz let out an unsteady breath. 

“That’s what I thought.”

Kaz kept his eyes on Inej’s face, watched the hungry focus there as she ghosted the blade down over his chin and across the soft give of the underside of his jaw. It slid along Kaz’s throat and Kaz couldn’t help the way he lifted his chin, baring the vulnerable line of his throat to her knife; the offering of an acolyte toward the violent, malevolent goddess he served.

Below his collarbone, Inej’s hand stilled its downward trail. Kaz knew he was breathing hard.

“You’re still flushed,” Inej said softly, smugly, almost to herself. Kaz felt small beneath her and, Saints, a quiet voice in him whispered that maybe he was meant to be this way: guided by Inej’s strength and the delicious threat or promise of her calculated, meticulous, glorious bits of violence. “I bet it won’t take very much to get you bleeding for me.”

Kaz’s hips twitched at that. Inej’s other hand was at his chest, pressing and intent.

“Don’t move.” Her voice was iron, was stone, was the kind of thing Kaz thought he had turned his heart into. He nodded, swallowing thickly.

Without another word, she pressed the sharp edge of Sankta Peytr down and drew it in an unrelenting line across the skin of his chest. Kaz gasped at the bright slice of pain that blossomed somewhere below his collarbone.

The cut wasn’t deep or even long and to Kaz, who had suffered too many major injuries to name, this was nothing. But it had definitely broken skin. Definitely drawn blood. And he could feel it. Oh, he could _feel_ it. 

The cut was all heat and a slow pulse of pain and Inej was on top of him, bending over him like a looming shadow with heat in her eyes and a knife in her hand and Kaz-

Kaz cursed softly, letting his head fall back against the chair. Inej let out a low breath.

“How does it feel?” Inej’s voice was very low and very quiet.

_It feels like pain and blood and violence_ , he thought. _Like all of life’s jagged things, the ones you feel and know you’re still alive._

_It feels like surrender, maybe. Like salvation._

“It- _Ah-_ Shit,” Kaz managed hoarsely. “Hot. It feels hot. And I can feel my pulse there.”

Inej pressed the tip of one gloved finger to the cut and the background ebb of pain flared into something sharper once more. Kaz groaned. He felt blood welling at the insistent pressure, felt the slick weight as a drop broke free to begin sliding down his chest. 

Inej let out a noise―something that sounded like it meant to be an exhale but came out with too much voice. It was a pleased and breathy thing that Kaz felt settle hot and heavy in his gut.

“Please,” he managed. Kaz didn’t know what he was asking for. Or if he was even asking for anything at all. His world had narrowed―contracted like a pupil in bright light―and held nothing now besides the sharp ebbing pulse of the cut, of lithe curve of Inej before him, blotting out the light behind her; the inky pass of a brushstroke.

And it was something fantastic, this feeling. 

Kaz had never known the sensation of feeling small to ever carry with it anything besides helplessness. It had only ever meant impending violence, and usually at the hands of someone who wanted to rob him of something. Money. Food. Information. Reputation. Life. Pride.

Inej had him pinned to a chair in his own room―was summoning his blood from beneath his skin like some sort of Corporalki―and yet even so, here with her Kaz did not feel angry or afraid or like he was about to have something stolen from him. 

Inej _was_ taking something from him in these tense and darkly colored moments, that Kaz was sure of. But hers was a different kind of taking. It was the kind that pulled a splinter from beneath skin, that sucked the poison from a wound.

There was definitely something fucked up inside of him, he decided. It was just one more thing that had been broken and healed horribly wrong, had come to find a new and twisted shape. There _had_ to be for Inej slicing him across the chest to cause Kaz to tremble and gasp in desire, to dredge any kind of softness or reverence from the murky depths of him when nothing else seemed to.

Inej slid the warmed leather of gloved fingertips across the planes of his chest, her index finger leaving a short coppery streak across his pectoral.

There was a stuttered exhale and it took Kaz a moment to realize it hadn’t been him who had made the sound. Inej was rapt, watching the shallow rise and fall of his chest and stomach beneath her hand.

“That’s something I like about you Kerch being so pale,” she murmured, her voice full of heat. “Blood stands out so bright against your skin.”

Without word or warning and with only a minute tilt of her shoulders, Inej sliced a diagonal cut across Kaz’s pectoral just a few inches below the first.

Kaz hissed through clenched teeth, tipping his head back and squeezing his eyes shut as the sharp burst of pain scorched through him like lightning. He heard Inej let out a low growl of a sound and he felt her hips shift along his thighs. Kaz shuddered at the thought that _Inej_ ―his pure and virtuous Wraith―had want blooming inside of her just from sitting on top of Kaz and slicing him to ribbons.

Objectively Kaz knew, of course, that Inej got something out of this thing they did together; he knew that if it wasn’t something she wanted, it wasn’t something she would do. This wasn’t the first time they had done this, or even the first time they had both shown obvious signs of arousal during, but every time it never failed to shake Kaz to his core.

Maybe he wasn’t the only one with something a little twisted inside of him. Maybe it wasn’t only Kaz who gathered together the things that pulled him into flashbacks and horror and shaking hands and offered them up to the other. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who had found that they might be able to twist each other’s darkness into something hot and magnetic and intoxicating.

Suddenly, Inej’s hand was in Kaz’s hair. She grasped a fistful of the longer strands near the crown of his head and yanked him up straighter, angling his neck back slightly.

Kaz sucked in a breath at the unexpected sharpness that shot across his skull and zipped down his spine. Inej was panting very lightly, her eyes hungrily taking in his face. He knew how he must look: face flushed and eyes a little hazy, his lips parted, the cuts on the left side of his chest still slowly oozing blood. Pliant and awed. Utterly at her mercy.

The thought of it _did_ something to Kaz.

Inej’s grip on his hair stayed firm when he tried to lower his chin; she tightened her hold, sending the leather of the gloves squeaking softly as the material rubbed against itself.

“I used to think about this all the time, you know. At the Menagerie,” she confessed softly. If she was at all apprehensive about mentioning her time at the House of Exotics, Kaz couldn’t see a speck of it in the dangerous fire of her eyes or the predatory slant of her smirk. “I used to think about holding them down and hurting them. All those men who paid her to see me. I thought about bruising that pristine mercher skin of theirs. Breaking their jaws with my fists. Making them _bleed_.”

_“You’re obviously dangerous.”_

Those were the words Kaz had spoken to Inej in the Peacock’s office the day he’d bought her indenture from Heleen Van Houden. And Inej, slight and wary then in Heleen’s flimsy silks, had looked back at Kaz like he’d just given her a gift.

Kaz was a man who was rarely ever taken by surprise but, Saints, if he had only known just how true those words would become.

Because Inej was _beautiful_ like this―threatening and powerful and in control. Far more beautiful than she had ever been dressed up in wispy silks and a painted face.

“I prayed to my Saints, asked them to forgive me for wanting to hurt people like that.” Inej paused to lick her lips. She let her hand slide from his hair. Kaz stayed where she had put him as she lowered her hand. “But it didn’t stop me from wanting it.”

And there it was again, Inej’s fingertips pressing down along the length of the fresh cut. It felt as if she were somehow pushing the stinging sweetness of the pain down into his skin; a bolt of lighting striking and skittering out from the point of contact in hot flashing tendrils.

Kaz let out a sound halfway between a hiss and a groan.

“I used to think about making them suffer, making them beg me to let them live. To have _mercy_ on them.” Inej dragged the bloodied fingertips of the glove on her right hand down across the swell of Kaz’s pectoral. They left bloody streaks across his pale skin. “I’d fantasize about letting them crawl back to their proper wives and jobs and bosses, letting them drown in the shame of it because I would leave marks so clear that no one would be able to ignore it. And then everyone would see and know _exactly_ what kind of creatures they were―what kind of things they did to young girls.”

Surely there was a piece inside of Kaz that was twisted, he thought again. Inej was confessing to him her past dreams of torture and revenge in that low, merciless voice and for it to leave Kaz hot and heady and wanting there must be something not quite right about him indeed.

Inej switched out Sankt Peytr, leaving it sunk a few inches into the soft wood of the chair back where her blade Sankta Alina been moments before. This knife had a beautiful bone handle that seemed almost to glow when it passed into the darkness of Inej’s shadow.

She pressed the palm of one glove flat against his sternum. Slowly, she began to slide it down across the the shallowly rising and falling skin of his stomach, tracing the lines of his abdominals with light touches.

This would have been impossible if Inej had not been wearing his gloves. And in that moment, Kaz felt infinitely grateful for their existence on her hands just then. Because the feel of her touch was distinctly leather, was _safe_ to Kaz, was warm and textured and different enough from human skin that it brought with it no rising water or rising terror.

It just felt good― _so_ good to have her running her hands across the expanse of his skin like it was hers to touch or tear.

“And then there’s you, Kaz,” Inej murmured, her voice a slow and carefree lilt. Her hand stilled. With her eyes downcast to his stomach flexing instinctively beneath her hand, her eyelashes looked impossibly long. Across the dark planes of her cheeks they cast fluttering, reaching shadows.

Kaz felt he might just break apart beneath her touch.

And in turn, he thought, Inej might just know how to close her fingers around the broken shards of him and somehow hold him together.

“Inej,” he managed, voice tight as she swiped her thumb hard along the line of her first cut. The pass wiped away any of the blood that had nearly dried there and Kaz felt it well to the surface once more, warm and thick and hot.

Inej hummed and leaned down beside his ear to whisper as she pressed down harder.

“Who knew Kaz Brekker would _like_ the kinds of things that I want to do to men?” Kaz shuddered at the pain, at Inej’s voice, at the slight way Inej’s hips moved again. He was still achingly hard and he could feel the pulse of his blood echoed there as Inej slid her fingers across his cuts. “You do like them, don’t you, Kaz? The ways I hurt you?”

Saints, Kaz wanted Inej to _ruin_ him.

His breath stuttered out of him in a broken moan. With the words, Inej had added another slice, another line of bright red pain to his torso. He couldn’t help the way his hips bucked forward slightly at her words and the pulses of hot pain and Inej’s weight on top of him.

In a blink, Inej pulled back from his ear. Her hand gripped his hip _hard_ to hold him still as the long and wicked edge of Sankta Alina was pressed back across his throat.

Kaz could barely breathe. He could feel blood beginning to drip from the cut she’d bit into the soft skin beneath the branching arc of his ribs.

“I thought I told you not to move.” Inej’s voice was low and threatening. Kaz swallowed and nodded minutely and Inej pressed the blade a fraction harder against the delicate skin of his neck.

“I could kill you. You know that, don’t you?” He could feel Inej’s breath on his cheeks, her voice heavy, weighted with dark and violent things. She wouldn’t. He knew that. She, of all people, never would. But the idea of it, the suggestion, the _reminder_ of the vulnerable position he’d placed himself in was _electric_. Every inch of his skin prickled. “They would find you dead in your own room. Half-dressed. Gloveless. They would know it had been me. Of course they would. Guess Dirtyhands did have _soft spot_ after all.”

Inej pressed the knife a fraction harder against his throat, punctuating the words, and Kaz felt the hot and itchy slide that came with a droplet of blood sliding across skin. Though Inej had barely nicked him, the pain was sharper there, his throat sensitive with so many nerve endings so close to the surface.

“Brekker finally bested by his own Wraith, they’d say.” The speculated words came in the mocking lilt of a lower-class Ketterdam native, close enough to him to _feel_. “Did’ja hear? Say he was covered in his own blood, dark as night. Wonder if it’s really true, eh? That Kaz Brekker bled _black_.”

Kaz shuddered violently. He wasn’t sure _why_ Inej using the crafted mask of his persona to spin these bloody and violent images had his body surging with want. Maybe it was one more thing about him that was broken―that had healed wrong.

Inej’s fingers were still digging sharply into his hip and Kaz felt alight with the pain, with the soft heat of Inej’s voice, with her breath on his skin.

He swore, a breathless and frantic thing. He heard Inej let out a smugly amused huff as the bruising pressure of her fingers at his hip slowly released. Her face was lit with the wicked smile of a ruthless conqueror.

“You didn’t answer my question, by the way.” Kaz stiffened as he felt leather-clad fingers sliding along the skin just above his belt. Inej’s words were soft, heavy and drawn out. They seemed to drip from her mouth like honey―thick and syrupy. “Do you like... how I hurt you?”

“ _Yes_.” It was more gasp than word. Inej’s fingers continued in their unhurried, aimless exploration. She huffed a breath through her nose at his reply.

“Oh, come on, Kaz. You can do better than that.” The words were light but hungry; a cat playing with a cornered mouse―assured of victory and reveling in the knowledge of it.

Reaching the line of dark hair that trailed from his belly button down beneath his waistband, one of her fingers slid up against the direction it naturally lay. Kaz was certain his fingers had red imprints of the edges of the chair seat considering long he’d been gripping them.

“I-” Kaz clenched his teeth, a shiver working its way through him.

Saints, but it was hard. It was so hard to trust. To _let go_.

Because in the Barrel, in their world of thugs and thieves, that was the kind of thing that got you scammed, got you robbed blind, got you beaten and left bleeding on the street if you were lucky and a canal if you weren’t. In Kaz’s world, that was the kind of thing that got you _dead_.

And yet. 

Kaz took a deep, shuddering breath. He shut his eyes, waiting for a hand in his hair or reprimand, but Inej did nothing. And so he left them closed as he spoke. It was easier like this.

_“This isn’t easy for me either.”_ Maybe some things would always be a struggle.

“I- I do. Like it. How you hurt me. And that you want to. That you _like_ hurting me. Sometimes- Shit, Inej, sometimes-” His voice was something broken and shaky, like debris littered across concrete after an explosion, like the ashes of a fire still smoldering―the sound of some kind of aftermath. “Sometimes it scares me the kind of things I’d let you do to me.”

Kaz’s thoughts were a trembling, stuttering swirl; they were ashes lifted by a breeze with some of their edges still glowing red hot. 

_I’d let you slice up my skin until my chest was red. Let you give me bruises that wouldn’t fade for weeks. Let you push the barrel of a loaded gun into my mouth._

_Let you distract me from the work with your hair and your laugh and the way you look when I've impressed you. I’d let you take away my armor piece by piece. Let you make me do it myself._

_Saints, Inej, I’d let you heal something inside of me._

Kaz was a thing not unlike one of Inej’s knives, he reasoned―something sharp and slight and deadly if applied with enough cunning or skill. He was something wicked and cruel, something crafted for the purposes of slicing things asunder.

But here, in Inej’s hands, her knives did not feel as if they severed.

This, here, was something a little bit closer to healing.

And at any other moment of his life it was a sentiment he would have _scoffed_ at, would have spit from of his mouth into a dirty canal, would have ground out beneath the sole of his shoe.

But hadn’t that always been the way with his Wraith? Things were always capable of more than they should be when it was Inej who wielded them. In her hands, a few inches of steel could bring a sudden and painful death. On her feet, a pair of rubber-soled slippers could scale six stories of sheer metal.

Beneath her knives, a twisted and terrible creature such as Kaz Brekker could be made to think of things like healing.

Inej’s pupils were blown wide. She watched him like a hawk watches prey, the entire terrible ferocity of her focus centered on him. She did not respond but Kaz felt a tremor pass through her thighs at the words. He had to bite his lip to stop himself from making a sound at the sensation of it.

Lifting the knife away Kaz’s throat, Inej brought her hand up to Kaz’s face. With fingers still curled around the handle of the blade, Inej brushed the back of her gloved knuckles along his cheekbone. Kaz’s breath stuttered at the contact, at the soft caress of it in the midst of the cuts still throbbing dully on his chest.

Without speaking, Inej adjusted her position, placing one knee back onto the chair’s seat between Kaz’s legs so she straddled only the thigh of his good leg. With a searing shock of want, Kaz felt her lower herself back, resting her weight on him once more. Only this time he could feel the _heat_ between her legs where she pressed down firmly on his thigh.

Kaz watched Inej’s eyes flutter shut for the barest sliver of a moment, drank in the dark flush to her cheeks that was visible even despite the deep brown color of her skin and felt overwhelmed, overtaken, _enraptured._

Stabbing Sankta Alina into the wooden back of the chair once more, she retrieved Sankt Peytr from it’s grip. The memory of Inej’s fingers curling around this first knife years ago was a vivid and breathless flash before his eyes.

The tip ghosted across Kaz’s parted lips and Kaz would bet cold hard kruge that Inej could see his frantic breath fogging across the metal of the blade.

That was when Kaz felt her hips jolt forward. It was a small and contained movement, but the warmth of it, the hotness of Inej’s core rubbing against the muscle of his thigh paired with the way her breath punched out in a hard huff through her nose nearly _ruined_ Kaz.

“ _Inej_ -” His voice was a strangled thing. He tasted blood and thought, distantly, that the tip of the blade might have broken the delicate skin of his lips.

Her hand paused, resting atop his belt buckle.

“Tell me to stop.” They were the words he had spoken to her all that time ago with his lips so deliriously and horrifyingly close to her skin. She repeated it slowly and deliberately, leaning harder into each word in the same way the edge of the knife bit harder into his skin. “Tell me to stop, Kaz.”

Kaz didn’t tell her to stop.

“Don’t.”

Fingers deft, even in his slightly too-large gloves, Inej undid his belt, then the button on his trousers, and finally slid down the zipper. Kaz made a soft noise at the brush of her fingers through the fabric that he normally would have been mortified to hear originate from his own mouth.

There wasn’t enough air in the room. Kaz felt lightheaded and feverish.

“Go ahead.” Inej’s eyes dropped in a pointed gaze to his undone fly before returning to meet his gaze. “I can see how much you want to. I can _feel_ it-” Inej ground down against Kaz’s thigh and he trembled at the flare of want that shot through him, “-in every muscle of you.”

So he did. With pale and shaking fingers, Kaz slid his hand beneath the open vee of his trouser fly to curl his hand over the hard line of his erection through the fabric of his underwear. Inej watched, rapt and ravenously focused, as Kaz gasped softly at the contact.

“Good, Kaz,” Inej breathed. The dark approval in her voice set his blood burning in his veins and he squeezed himself tightly. Inej dragged the length of her blade lightly along the plane of his cheek and Kaz responded in kind by dragging his own shaky grip up the length of himself. His eyes fell closed then flew open wide half a moment later, his jaw falling open in startled pleasure. “Just like that.”

Inej was beginning to move with consistent little thrusts of her hips and Kaz could feel ever single bit of it. It was all so overwhelming―the trembling tension of her knife on his skin, the pulsing of pain on his chest, even the friction of material between his hand and cock, rubbing rough along the sensitized skin.

“Inej,” Kaz bit out, panting and ragged. “ _Inej_.”

Inej slid the thumb of her free hand across his bottom lip, as if trying to collect the way her name sounded in his desperate voice on the leather there. Or maybe that was the blood. Kaz could feel the thick wetness, the metallic taste as it smeared over his lip at the motion and he shuddered.

Inej let out a heated sound, a low “ _haaa_ ” of pleasure and approval and lifted her hand away, bringing it to her own mouth.

Kaz watched in a heated daze, his grip on himself squeezing just on the edge of too tightly, as Inej slid the pad of the glove’s thumb across her own lower lip. She smirked down at him, a conquerer about to plant a flag into the soil, her mouth wet and red with Kaz’s blood like some kind of demonic war paint.

“There,” she whispered, her breath punching out of her nose in sharp huffs as she ground herself down on his thigh with rhythmic intent. “Now we match.”

Kaz swore softly. He felt a little unhinged at the sight. _Glorious_. That was the word for how Inej looked now. He thought about kissing her, about what it might be like to taste Inej with blood on her lips.

Having nearly died many times, Kaz Brekker was was no stranger how it felt clinging to the edge of life by bloody fingertips. He was familiar with how the world grew hazy, how one’s vision narrowed, how seconds seemed to slow to a ragged crawl. This was a little like that, he thought.

Distantly, heatedly, morbidly and stupidly, Kaz thought that if he were allowed choose the way he went, he might pick Inej and her knives to be the dealers of his final fate.

A hand slid up the back of his neck and into his hair, gripping hard. Inej yanked his head back in a vicious tug, baring the pale arc of Kaz’s throat to her.

“Keep going,” she hissed, low and commanding. Kaz realized his hand had stilled. He resumed his slow and grating stroke, the fabric burning rough and delicious and just the right side of too much.

Inej’s breaths were coming fast now. Kaz could feel them on his cheeks, her face so close to his. They were accompanied occasionally by soft breathy sounds of pleasure. The cold press of Sankt Peytr into the vulnerable skin above his Adam’s apple had Kaz groaning and he felt himself twitch hard against his hand, his eyelids fluttering.

Strands of Inej’s hair were beginning to stick to her forehead with sweat, her cheeks tinted red with flush. Yet even with her eyes hooded in pleasure, her lips parted by panting breaths, she did not look soft or pliant.

Inej looked like an encroaching thunderstorm. Undeniable. Dangerous. All-encompassing.

Pleasure was a blur that pulled at minutes like taffy, stretching and condensing them.

Intermittently, Inej dropped the knife to cut several more thin lines across his chest and one across his stomach. Kaz gasped and groaned and hissed beneath Inej and her glorious, terrible whim. The heat in his gut was a steadily growing thing and he could feel himself rapidly approaching the cliff's edge.

At some point the grip on his hair released. Kaz watched as, still sheathed in his glove, Inej slid her hand beneath the waistband of her trousers. She didn't pause in the continuous rocking rhythm of her hips, didn’t pull the knife from his throat, simply pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and sighed at the added pressure.

Kaz groaned, desperate and ragged as he watched her touch herself. He could feel the movements of it glancing against his thigh as her fingers worked in quick, small circles. He felt  _unraveled_. 

“I-Inej,” he panted, not knowing if her name was meant to be a warning or a request or something else entirely. Her eyes snapped up from his mouth to meet his rapturous gaze. Her own lips were parted in pleasure, muscles shaking lightly. "Inej, I-"

“Come on, Kaz,” Inej breathed, shallow and insistent. “Show me what I do to you. Want to see what you look like when you let go.”

Such a simple thing it seemed to be in the end―letting go. 

Kaz came with a soft, drawn out groan. His whole body trembled violently, his hips bucking up into the pressure of his hand. His eyes blurred wildly, rolling closed when he could no longer force them to remain open and take in the hazy sight of Inej watching him shudder apart beneath her.

As his hand slowed, he registered the wet heat of his orgasm slick and warm against his skin and where it was quickly soaking into the fabric of his waistband.

“Saints,” Inej breathed. There was something very much like awe in her voice. “Oh _Saints,_ Kaz. That was _beautiful_.”

When Inej eventually came, she did so as she did most other things, quietly and gracefully, with a small gasp and a shudder and a gorgeous arch of her back. Kaz couldn’t have looked away from her face if he'd tried.

After a moment she slumped forward against him, her forehead against his, both of them sweaty and panting. Kaz was aware in a distant sort of way that no revulsion was bubbling up inside of him for the place their skin touched. The knife clattered from Inej’s grip to the floor beside them to be retrieved later.

Kaz raised one trembling hand, bare and vulnerable, to rest it against the curve of Inej’s hip, her trousers sweat-damp, the heat of her skin searing even through the cloth.

They were breathing each other’s air, faces inches apart.

Inej’s hair hung down around their faces, a dark and silken curtain that seemed to be trying to prolong this suspended moment―to keep out the rest of the world for just a little longer.

They spent long minutes like that, pressed close together as they caught their breaths, savoring this moment of uncomplicated closeness.

What a precious thing it was. How valuable.

Kaz Brekker, master of leverage and striker of deals, did not believe in the concept of "pricelessness" and was not given to sentimental cliche at even the best of times. And so did not think the word now.

Besides, he reasoned, making it here to this moment, alive and breathing―and with hearts resilient and brave enough to try―had cost them both far too much to ever call it priceless.

When Inej drew back, she was smiling. It was a soft and rare kind of smile that only ever graced Inej’s face once in while. There was fondness in her eyes then as she looked at Kaz. It had not replaced the hunger from before, but it had blurred it into something more playful.

“Here,” she said. Her smirk was a mischievous and wonderful thing with a smear of dried blood still darkly smudged along her bottom lip. Sliding her hand out from her trousers, she brought it to his mouth, the black leather of the fingertips wet and shining in the low light. “Have your gloves back, Dirtyhands.”

Kaz’s eyes fluttered shut as everything inside him momentarily ground to a halt. A low, desperate sound managed to escape him.

“You’re going to be the death of me, Wraith,” he whispered against her fingertips, eyes still closed. Inej slipped two fingers past his lips and, _Saints_ , Kaz could taste her on his tongue. He groaned brokenly.

Inej laughed then, soft and fond, and Kaz thought the word _miracle_.

“Of course I will,” she replied. Easy as anything. “No one else has earned the right.”

He could feel his heart beating a frantic and visceral rhythm inside his chest and he wondered what kind of impossible, miraculous things it might be capable of in Inej’s hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos always appreciated!  
>   
> [fanfic/podfic blog](http://zoe-bug.tumblr.com/) | [personal](http://xiexiecaptain.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/xiexiecaptain)


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